Monthly Archives: January 2017

Our first morning of litter picking and path clearing for a couple of months  – and  there was a lot of rubbish in the woods today.

There were nine of us t and we began with about 40 minutes of litter picking around Old Leo’s, along Crag Lane and down towards the cricket club.  We picked up many bags of rubbish and made a huge difference to the appearance of the woods.

Litter picking

Your correspondent could write much about the litter which we find in the woods.  One category which is particularly irksome comes from the habit of  some dog walkers to pick up dog poo in plastic bags but then to throw the bags into the undergrowth or hang them up on trees or bushes.  Presumably, they bag up the poo so that they can appear to be doing the right thing, and then dispose of the bag when they think that no one can see them.  If you are a dog walker and  have been doing this, please continue to bag up your dog’s poo, but please take it home and dispose of it properly.  The Friends of Adel Woods find it extremely yucky to have to pick up wet and slimy bags of poo.

A new kind of litter first appeared in January of this year:  lots of deflated balloons and small glass phials.  Apparently, these are the detritus from a new fashion of substance abuse – the inhaling of laughing gas.  When surveying the nest boxes earlier this month we found balloons and phials in the woods near the rugby clubhouse.  Today there were about 25 of the glass phials deposited in the car park.  Let us hope that this is a short-lived craze.

On a brighter note, we also found £1.15 which we have added to FOAW funds!

Path Clearing

Before …

Leaving Steph to continue litter picking, the rest of us set off to  the very top end of the woods to remove a tree which had fallen across the path and to cut back the encroaching holly.

Half an hour of hard work and the job was done.

…and after

We then walked back to the Stairfoot Lane carpark, and set off along the path which runs parallel to and below Crag Lane.  There a real whopper of a tree had come down.  After careful evaluation of the job we were able to saw it up and remove it from the path.

As we did this, Chris and Sylvia cut holly back from the path.

Before…

By now it was 12.10 pm and we set off back to Old Leo’s carpark but 50 yards along, we found another tree lying across our path.  We agreed to remove this and were able to cut it up and drag it into the undergrowth in about five minutes of focused work.

…and after

We all agreed that we had had a very productive and successful morning in the woods.

The weather throughout the morning was very pleasant.  To our surprise, a few flakes of icy snow began to fall as we got into our cars.

Say “Trees”!

Yesterday we cleaned and surveyed eighteen nest boxes.  Only thirteen left to do this morning!  Fortunately, the remaining ones were all in a straight line down the Meanwood Valley Trail between the Slabbering Baby and the Seven Arches, which makes them much easier to find.

Another perfect day for the task but a smaller team – Steve Joul and three assistants for the first hour and two assistants after that (as your correspondent had to leave for a funeral).

Of the thirteen nest boxes, one was a robin box which could not be found.  All the rest of the boxes (including a starling or treecreeper box) were used by tits.

In case you are wondering what a starling or treecreeper box is, here is a picture.  It is a lot deeper than a tit box and the entrance is on the side of the box, next to the tree trunk.   The tit nest is right at the bottom of the box and it is amazing to think of young great tits or blue tits climbing their way up to the exit when it is time for them to leave the nest.  Since this picture was taken, the nest box has been improved by the addition of a metal plate around the entrance and a plastic roof and back.

View of a tit nest

One of the tit boxes seems to have been used at least temporarily by a pair of nuthatches because the lid was plastered with mud.  However, the nest inside was a tit nest of moss, grass, fur and hair, rather than a nuthatch nest of wood chips.

All in all, another great morning’s work.

Thank you to everyone who took part in this year’s nest box cleaning and surveying, and thanks of course to Steve Joul for sharing all his amazing knowledge and skills.

For the eighth January running, FOAW joined Steve Joul in cleaning out and surveying the nest boxes in Adel Woods.

We had a great team of seven until lunchtime, when some of us had to leave for other duties.  In the afternoon, there was a team of three.  The weather was perfect – dry, mild and no wind.  Your correspondent even worked up a sweat in the afternoon!

As usual, pretty well all of the tit boxes were used last Spring, but none of the robin boxes were used.

The robin boxes have never been used by robins (we have had the odd tit nest) and so we probably ought to think about moving them.  Currently, they are all stationed in the middle of holly bushes about two or three feet off the ground.  So very difficult and prickly to find – at least for human beings.

A multicoloured tit nest!

Every year the survey is different and this year was no exception.  It is quite usual to find the odd unhatched egg in the nesting material, and we measure the eggs to see if the nest box was used by blue tits or the larger great tits.  This year, we found a number of nests containing the skeletons of chicks – in a couple as many as five or six.  This was unusual – we have probably found no more than a couple of skeletons in total in all the previous seven years of surveying nest boxes.

Measuring eggs found in a nest box

The number of skeletons found this year seems to suggest that there were some difficulties for tits during the breeding season – presumably bad weather which meant that there was insufficient food to feed all the young.

However, it was not a disastrous season.  Blue tits typically lay about 8 to 12 eggs but sometimes lay as many as 16! Great tits typically lay 7 to 9 eggs but may lay as many as 15.  So even where a number of the young died in the nest last season, the chances are that perhaps four or five young successfully grew up and left the nest.

This year we had one nuthatch nest in our tit boxes.  Nuthatch nests are very different from tit nests which are made of moss, fur, hair and grass.  The first suggestion that a nuthatch has nested in the box is that the lid is glued down, and all gaps in the woodwork are filled,  with mud.  When opened the nest is made of lots of little chips of wood – rather like a bowl of bran flakes!  It was pleasing to have a nuthatch nest – we didn’t have any last year, though we had two a couple of years ago.  Interestingly, the nuthatch nest was in the box by the bridge near Adel Pond – the very same tree where nuthatches nested previously.

A nuthatch nest in one of our woodcrete nest boxes – unfortunately, not a clear picture, but you can see where the nuthatches have plastered mud round the rim of the nest box.

We finished work as dusk began to fall at about 4 pm, by which time we had surveyed 18 nest boxes.